Improbable People: A Love Story

Sally Klein O’Connor is a storyteller. She tells one about an eight year old girl whose life was forever changed the day a German Shepherd bit her face leaving an indelible scar. She talks about the pain, the humiliation that girl felt when day after day her third grade classmates taunted her with unkind cries of “Scarface!!”

She tells another about a young woman who challenged a rabbi to show her where he kept the plant pods—a reference to the film Invasion of the Body Snatchers—believing people of faith to be mindless zombies. That tale carries an O. Henry-type twist with the girl entering the rabbi’s study a cynic and exiting a believer in Yeshua, Jesus.

She shares another that goes like this:

Boy meets girl.

Girl likes boy.

Girl discovers Jesus and receives Him as her savior.

Boy proposes marriage.

Girl accepts.

Boy and girl set date.

Girl realizes a marriage of a believer to a non-believer would likely not endure.

Girl calls off wedding. Promises to wait ten years for boy if he will honestly search for the truth.

Boy spends two years looking for—mostly running from—God.

Boy finds Jesus during Game 6 of the 1986 World Series.

Boy and girl live 99 44/100% happily ever after with three beautiful daughters and a ministry God drops into their laps.

Yes, Sally is a storyteller all right. And each of these narratives are reflections on her very own life. She shares them in concert. She shares them in her essays and songs. She even shared them in her first book Beauty in the Beast.

She is also a singer. The temptation is to describe Sally Klein O’Connor as having “the voice of an angel.” I know I have. The truth is more real, less ethereal, Sally’s vocals are not as polished nor quite so harmonic as one imagines an angel would sound.

Perhaps what they mean—what people hear—is the heart that worships God in song. And though we cannot know for certain, I imagine Sally in the throes of worship is as close as we get here on earth to replicating the angels’ worship of the Sovereign Lord.

How can I sing the praises of Sally Klein O’Connor so unabashedly? Quite easily, actually. You see, I’m the “Boy” in her story. I invite you to pour through this site and discover, as thousands have, the joy of listening to her music, the compelling nature of her testimony, the deft, poetic pose of her pen—ok, keypad. You’ll discover the adventurous missions to foreign lands, catch up on the latest through the Improbable People Ministries e-newsletter, dig into the history of IPM and the biographies of Sally and myself. There are ministry and family photo albums to peruse, videos to watch, a calendar to help catch a concert at a nearby venue, a pipeline to get in touch, and even a place to buy some of her CDs.

I invite you to venture in and spend some time with us. We’ve been here since 1990 as Improbable People and, until God gives us new marching orders, we’ll be around for a while longer. . .